


I Can't Live Without My Name

by andthewasp



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky as Yasha, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Red Room (Marvel), Red Room!Clint, detailed descriptions of spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 15:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20117023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andthewasp/pseuds/andthewasp
Summary: The Wolf Spider program, the male equivalent to the widely successful Black Widow program, was shut down and declared a failure.It was no real loss, as far as anyone was concerned.





	I Can't Live Without My Name

**Author's Note:**

> TIL that there was a male version of the black widow program called the wolf spider program, that was shut down after only one successful wolf spider. believe it or not i am not the leading expert on the red room and what all the details of it are, but i tried to do my research and i read and reread all of my black widow comics to prepare for this prompt. i hope you enjoy and that it doesn't stray too far from canon!
> 
> i should also mention that clint and bucky go by like, five different names each in this fic. it's sort of a running theme
> 
> this was written for the 2019 winterhawk bingo and was for the card "red room!clint/red room!bucky"

Wolf Spiders are different from most spiders, in that they methodically stalk their prey. There’s no need for the tangled mess of webs. Unlike the Black Widow, who draws her meal to her web with long black legs and a tantalizing red-lipped smile, the Wolf Spider  _ hunts.  _ He does not wait for the food to come to him, rather, seeking it out and attacking viciously like the dog he is so aptly named after. The Wolf Spider’s heightened senses also make for simpler, more effective hunting that the Black Widow lacks. Sharper eyesight, acute hearing. He is faster, reckless, and unpredictable. 

Some say that Wolf Spiders only bite when provoked.

This is not true.

+

Niko Constantin was the first of his name, but ultimately a failure.

The Wolf Spider ops program, coined as the male equivalent to  Grigor Chelintsov’s Black Widow program, was effective, but not in the way anyone had hoped it would be. Niko proved that men could not be beaten so easily into submission, and became ruthless. The first Wolf Spider was impossible to handle, no amount of false memories or training could get Niko to comply like the young girls in the Black Widow program did. He got the job done, but it was always bloodier, messier than the program entailed. Niko Constantin got tangled in his own web.

So Niko was killed, a bullet to the head, and the Wolf Spider program shut down. It was no real loss, as far as anyone was concerned.

+

Approximately one year after the Winter Soldier begins working with the Red Room, and seven months after he paints a wall red with Niko Constantin’s brains, Grigor Chelintsov approaches him outside one of the training rooms. Classical music can be heard from inside.

_ “Soldat,” _ says Chelintsov, his voice firm and cold. The Soldier expects nothing less from the man behind the Red Room. “We have a new pupil for you.”

The Winter Soldier does not let his eyes drift to the tall oak door they are standing beside or his thoughts to the twenty eight girls relentlessly practicing ballet beyond it. He keeps his gaze steady and trained on Chelintsov, as he has been trained to do and has taught others to do as well. And will continue to do with…

“A boy,” continues the professor. This time the Soldier is unable to hide his surprise, one eyebrow lifting up and his jaw loosening. To most, it would be unnoticeable. “Please, try to keep your emotions in check,  _ soldat.” _

He tightens his jaw once more. “I was under the impression that the Wolf Spider program had been shut down.”

“We’re reopening it. Kudrin believes the fault may have been with the man, not with the program. This boy is younger than Niko was.”

A child, then. Starting him young, as is customary in the Red Room. Constanin had been an adult. In most cases, that should not have made a difference.

The Winter Soldier flexes his metal hand behind his back, feeling the gears whizz and hum with the movement. The Soldier does not know what he was before the Red Room, before the ice he woke from. He is all the proof they need that Niko was the problem; that men  _ can  _ be trained to be the lethal little spiders they so desperately want.

Chelintsov continues, looking at the Soldier over his little spectacles, “You’ll begin training with him tomorrow. Until then, continue your lessons with the girls.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Big week for them,” Chelintsov says in a tone that is nothing short of eerie, disappearing back beyond the door where the girls are currently having ballet training.

Once upon a time the Winter Soldier may have gone after the man, stolen away the young girls to let them live their own lives away from the Red Room and Russia, but that must have been before he became himself. Now, he just manages to repress a shudder.

+

The boy is small, with skinny arms and bruised knees and dusty blonde hair. He’s no good with hand to hand combat, lacking the poise that the Black Widows have gathered with their ballet training, but has deadly sharp accuracy, as the Winter Soldier quickly comes to find.

The Soldier stands back and watches the boy carefully as he fires a handgun at a target, every shot landing dead center.

“You’re good with this,” the Soldier tells the boy absently, toeing forward and nudging the boy’s foot with his own, edging his legs closer together. With his left hand’s pointer finger, the Soldier moves the gun up a centimeter.

Another shot fills the room as he fires. The Soldier does not need to look to know it has hit its mark. The gun only lowers when he runs out of ammo, the Winter Soldier standing back behind the boy once again.

“I’m better with…” the finger that rests on the trigger of the gun twitches. The Soldier keeps his eye on it as the boy continues, “I don’t remember.”

He obediently passes over the gun when the Soldier holds out his hand.

“That’s alright,” the Winter Soldier tells the Wolf Spider, instead of punishing him like he should. Broken fingers won’t do anyone any good. “Let’s work on your hand to hand again.”

+

“What’s your name?” asks the Wolf Spider one evening, one month after his training began. In two nights, he will leave for his first mission. By the end of the week, he will have his first kill.

“I have many names,” the Soldier says earnestly, pinning the Spider down with a hand to his throat. He splutters for a moment, a hand tugging uselessly at the metal wrist, before getting a handle on things and shoving a knee into the Winter Soldier’s gut, rolling them onto their sides. A well timed kick and a punch to the eye land the Soldier on his stomach, hands behind his back with the Wolf Spider straddling his back.

There is laughter in the boy’s voice. “The Winter Soldier is your name as much as the Wolf Spider is mine.”

He yelps as the Soldier gets his arms free and around his neck. The Spider struggles to breath, his hands clutching desperately at nothing. Before he can pass out, he falls hands first onto the wooden floor, staining it red where his palms land. He coughs, back hunched as he tries to fill his lungs with air.

The Soldier hauls him up by the scruff of his neck, tugging his face close. To his credit, he does not look afraid. He has a bloody nose and his blue eyes swim with something the Soldier does not recognize. The Wolf Spider sniffs and averts his gaze, mouth falling open in a poorly suppressed cough. “I’m allowed to ask questions, aren’t I?”

Scoffing, the Winter Soldier shoves the Spider away. He should be punishing him, should be breaking an arm instead of just fingers like he did a few days ago. He cannot find it within himself to do it.

Instead, he grits out, “clean yourself up,” and leaves the room.

+

The Black Widow and the Wolf Spider programs have separate sleeping halls, rows of old iron beds and scratchy white sheets lining the walls. Only one bed is occupied in the Wolf Spider room when the Soldier enters just past three am, in the corner under a window. If that was Niko Constantin, the Soldier would not trust him to be near the window, even with the handcuff protocol. The Wolf Spider, the younger one who has yet to kill anyone, is awake and fiddling with his own handcuffs when the Winter Soldier approaches, moonlight filtering in through the window above him and landing on his face. His eyes flick to the Soldier’s, and manages not to look surprised at his presence, but his nimble fingers stop moving.

“I’m not trying to break out,” he swears before the Winter Soldier can even ask. “It’s just… uncomfortable.”

The Soldier knows a bit what that’s like. The bed looks tempting, but instead he places himself on the floor beside the Spider’s bed, close to his feet. He struggles against his handcuffs for a moment as he sits up as well as they will let him, trying to get a good view at the Soldier, who sits just at the edge of the moonlight cast over them.

“They call me Yasha, sometimes.” The Wolf Spider watches the Soldier intently as he talks, eyes wide and mouth in a thin line. “When I’m not… here.”

“You do other things?”

“Not for a while. But I used to.” He’s sure he did, but the details are foggy. The longer he’s out of the ice the more he wonders what he was like before it. “I worked for other people, not just the Russians.”

There is a light clang as the Wolf Spider tries to move the hand that is handcuffed to the iron bars at the top of the bed. He sighs heavily, leaning back against it and letting his eyes drift to the ceiling and away from the Soldier. “They take memories from you, too, huh?”

“So it seems.”

“That doesn’t upset you?”

“I don’t have a good answer to that question,” says the Soldier, honest. He doesn’t really feel anything. But to know that there was more to him once, that he had a name and people who knew him and a favorite color and a hobby that didn’t involve killing people, well.

It just feels like that was someone else.

The Wolf Spider looks older from the Soldier’s view, even though he’s no older than thirteen. Hair tousled from uncomfortable sheets, a bruise under his eye. Sleep shirt hanging loosely from his shoulders.

“Can I tell you my name?” asks the Spider, quiet enough that only someone as well trained as the Winter Soldier could hear it.

Names are something you earn, in the Red Room. Never spoken aloud unless you have proven your worth. 

Hesitantly, the Soldier nods.

After a long, tense silence, the boy whispers, “my name is Kliment.”

_ Merciful, _ the Soldier knows it means. He knows it was not the name his mother gave to him, to a smiling blond baby boy. But it is the name that mother Russia has chosen for him. The Winter Soldier thinks of Niko, of  _ victory, _ and knows this is true.

The Soldier rises from his spot on the floor, reaching out and letting his fingers brush with the hand that is not handcuffed, skin to skin. “Sleep well,  _ malen'kiy yastreb,  _ and good luck with your mission tomorrow.”

The boy does not question the new name, nor does he say anything else as the Winter Soldier leaves the room.

+

The next time Yasha sees Kliment, it is nearly six years after his first mission and the night in the Wolf Spider room. To Yasha, it feels more like two months or so, only coming out of the ice briefly for a mission. He has very little memories of his year spent at the Red Room, mostly of girls with their hair tied back in tight buns and the sound of tiny bones snapping under his hand. But beyond that, a blond child lingers in his thoughts, with clever eyes and a tendency to laugh during training. Kliment, Yasha remembers, better than anything else.

The Black Widows are all in their teens now, hips wider and breasts fuller than Yasha remembers them being the last time he trained with them. They dance with perfect balance and grace, fight with ruthless flair and pull their targets in through their webs.

The Wolf Spider still lacks poise.

Yasha tells him as much, when he first sees him the morning after he returns to the Red Room. Kliment does not look surprised to see him, he never did around the Soldier, and continues to land relentless hits on the punching bag. Stepping up to the bag, Yasha places his hands on either side of it to prevent Kliment from doing anything. “They should have made you do ballet with the Widows,” he says, not mean, but not exactly warm either. He stumbles a little on his Russian, out of practice from his years in the ice and two months in Romania. “Your balance is off.”

“You going to break my hand for it?”

“Maybe.” Yasha steps away. “Adjust your center of gravity.”

Kliment does, landing some solid punches before giving Yasha an expectant look. He waves his metal hand in a  _ so-so _ gesture, causing the other man to roll his eyes. “You disappear for six years yet nothing has changed.”

“In our line of work that isn’t exactly uncommon.” Yasha wanders over to a table in the corner of the room, grabbing a book off the top of a stack. “Position.”

He does as Yasha says, legs slightly more than shoulder width apart and arms held up in a fighting stance towards the punching bag. Kliment says nothing as Yasha nudges his feet closer together and sets the book atop his head, balanced delicately. He waits until Yasha has taken a stride back to begin his punches to the bag again, managing to keep the book on his head for only a few punches, stopping once it rattles to the floor.

“Again.”

The second time, the book falls after five punches. The third, after sixteen. They keep going until Kliment’s knuckles are bleeding through the tape and the book has stopped teetering off his head.

“Was that so hard?” Yasha teases, holding out his flesh hand to help Kliment up from where he rests on the floor. “Balance.”

“I’d like to see you try it,” mutters Kliment, still breathing heavily. He looks steadily at Yasha after a moment, getting his first good look at him. Yasha knows he looks the same as he did six years ago, long hair and grey eyes and all. Kliment has aged well into a young man, blond hair cut short to regulation but tousled with sweat, blue eyes earnest and somehow still swimming with an emotion that Yasha can’t quite read, after all these years.

“You’re not so little anymore, are you hawk?”

“No.”

“Hm. Let’s see if you still shoot as well as you used to.”

+

They run into each other on a mission in Budapest, Yasha with Hydra and Kliment with a Widow named Natalia. They’re posing as a married couple attending a wedding, Natalia luring the hit into her web and Kliment hunting down his gang by himself. Yasha kills the man himself before Natalia can get him to her motel room, but lets Kliment go after the gang as planned. Naturally, Natalia attempts to kill the Soldier herself for stealing the kill, and nearly succeeds, before Kliment interferes to pull Yasha into a tight hug.

“You old bastard, I haven’t seen you since Alyosha job!” Yasha racks his memory but nothing comes up under  _ Alyosha. _ Something Hydra must have removed, then.

“The Winter Soldier just killed our target and you’re  _ excited  _ about it?” The Widow says accusingly, prodding Kliment’s shoulder roughly, then pressing a hand to her forehead. “We’re already in enough trouble with the fucking gang, we don’t need Chelintsov taking one of our eyes or cutting off your fingers on top of that.”

“What went wrong with the gang?” asks Yasha, turning to Natalia. If he thinks hard enough, he can almost remember training her. Red hair, good with a knife.

“It’s nothing we can’t handle,” interjects Kliment before the Black Widow can say anything. “We just might be in Budapest for a bit longer than we anticipated.”

In the Red Room, there was very little room for error. The Winter Soldier felt something bubbling under his skin, something like  _ fear, _ at the thought of these two getting caught in the already tangled web of the Red Room and this gang.

Yasha could not let himself get tangled in it as well.

“Be careful,  _ yastreb, _ ” said the Soldier quietly before he left. “I’d hate to hear you got yourself killed.”

+

Yasha comes out of the ice in 1987 with word of a mission to kill the Wolf Spider. He and Natalia, the Black Widow he was with in Budapest, have escaped the Red Room and work through the shadows with clear intent to bring it down.

He does not know what to do.

At a little village in New Mexico, Yasha sits on a park bench and waits.

He doesn’t wait long, unsurprisingly, the Wolf Spider planting himself down beside the Winter Soldier like it’s no big deal. He’s grown a decent beard and hides his blue eyes behind sunglasses, but Yasha would recognize him anywhere.

“Is she here?” asks the Soldier, in English.

“Why would I tell you?” asks the Spider, in Russian.

“I’m not going to kill you,” says Yasha, in Russian.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” says Kliment, in English.

They sit in silence. A woman with platinum blonde hair walks by, holding a pile of magazines with Spanish names on the cover. Yasha doesn’t bother doing a double take.

“I’ve been having these dreams.” Kliment looks over at Yasha, raising an eyebrow. Yasha continues, “Skinny boys with blond hair and bruises.”

“You’ve been dreaming about me, how sweet.” His tone is sarcastic.

“Except it wasn’t you. It was someone else.”

Kliment stares straight ahead, at where Natalia now sits on a park bench across from them, reading one of her foregin magazines. “Constantin?”

“No, it’s…” Yasha searches for the words. “Someone I knew, before. Hydra, the Red Room, they took memories from me, like they took from you and Natalia and all of the other Black Widows, and I keep hearing… Names. Faces, smells. Things like that.”

“Like what?”

Yasha thinks. “I had a... a brother, or a friend, named Steve. My mother made the best stew in New York City. Our apartment had this ugly green carpet that always smelled like the parsnip my little sister spilled on it when we were kids. They’d write letters, the three of them, to… to me, and they smelled like that carpet but also like the cigarettes Becca wasn’t supposed to smoke. Steve always drew on the paper because we couldn’t afford enough paper for him to be able to draw and write letters to me. And, I.” Yasha stops suddenly, sucking in a heavy breath. He had been talking in English, his voice thick with a Brooklyn accent. “My name was James.”

Unexpectedly, Kliment holds out his hand. In English, “nice to meet you James, I’m Clint.”

Yasha takes the hand that is extended towards him, giving it a firm shake. “That’s very American of you.”

Clint laughs, and it’s a sweet sound.

_ Settlement, _ thinks Yasha. It fits him better than  _ merciful. _

+

1999, New Years Eve. The Winter Soldier sits on a rooftop, his rifle pointed at a lively party going down on the streets below. The woman Hydra needs him to kill is somewhere down there. She’ll be dead before she can ring in the New Year.

“You know,” says a familiar voice from behind him, “some people believe the end of the world begins tonight, so why bother?”

James doesn’t bother turning around to look at Clint. Instead, he adjusts his grip on the gun, his eye still trained down at the crowds of people.

“Most people usually say ‘hello, happy new year, how have you been?’” Clint all but throws himself down next to James. “I’ve been great, thank you for asking. Been stocking up on canned goods to be prepared for the end times, which, it this point I’ll be disappointed if it  _ doesn’t _ happen. I don’t want to eat peaches for the rest of my sorry life, if I’m being honest with you.”

“I hear you’re going by Hawkeye, now,” says James, finally sparing Clint a glance. He’s dressed in his purple suit, quiver of arrows resting between them and his bow resting atop his thighs.  _ James _ certainly didn’t teach him to shoot that thing.

“Sure am. Sounds better than Wolf Spider, don’t you think?”

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, James looks back through his scope. “Let me guess, you’re here for Popov?”

Clint has the gall to look guilty for a moment. “What, I can’t pay a visit to my old friend the Winter Soldier?”

“You couldn’t at least pick a different rooftop? God forbid someone sees you and realizes I didn’t kill you like I was supposed to.”

Dramatically throwing a hand over his heart, Clint says, “Agh, you wound me, Soldier.” Suddenly getting serious for a second, he continues, “I’m surprised you remember that.”

“We’ve talked about it before.”

“Sure, but every time I see you I half expect you to be the same guy you were when I was thirteen. The guy who had his memory wiped every time he disappeared and didn’t know who Edgar Allen Poe was.” James actually rolls his eyes at that one. Clint doesn’t even bother suppressing his laugh, clapping James on the shoulder affectionately. “I like you like this, come on. You don’t get to break my fingers whenever you want.”

James smiles. “I could still do that.”

Beside him, Clint stiffens strangely. James snaps to attention, looking at Clint. “What? Did you hear something?”

“No, I just,” Clint’s blue eyes lock with James’ grey ones, “I genuinely think that was the first time I’d ever seen you smile.”

He starts to protest, to say  _ that’s not true, _ but instead James pulls his eyes away, looking back down his scope. Nadia Popov takes a shot from someone who looks way too young to be holding alcohol. Swiftly and without fanfare, the Winter Soldier pulls the trigger of his rifle just as the crowd yells, raising their drinks to the year 2000.

Unbothered, Clint looks over the ledge. “Would you look at that. We still have electricity.”

“Have a good New Year, Hawkeye,” says James as he stands, loudly over the commotion below. “Enjoy your canned foods.”

Clint waves a hand dismissively. “Yeah, yeah. Pity the poor schmuck who was just trying to be prepared for the end of the world.”

Despite himself, James laughs as he turns and walks away from the ledge. He an almost picture the look on Clint’s face.

+

“Niko Constantin is alive,” says Clint over the phone.

“He’s  _ what?” _ yells James. The man he is currently sitting on top of screams something, but it’s muffled by the rag that is stuffed in his mouth. Tired of dealing with him, James shoved the phone between his shoulder and ear, snapping his neck in one quick movement.

The phone is a landline, connected to the wall by a cord. James doesn’t know how Clint knew he had a hit in this apartment, but doesn’t ask. He loops the greying cord around the hand holding the phone and pressed his other hand to his forehead. “I killed him, before you were even in the Red Room.”

“You of all people should know about false memories.” James supposes that’s a good point. There’s a scuffle of something on Clint’s end, yelling and maybe a gunshot. “Am I interrupting something?”

“Nope!” yelps Clint, perhaps too cheerful. “But, ah, if you could get here as fast as you can, that would be nice.”

“Where is ‘here’?”

“The Red Room.”

James is out of the apartment before the cord even untangles all the way and the phone hits the floor.

+

The Winter Soldier’s handlers aren’t going to be happy about him going AWOL, but he had been meaning to kill them, anyway, so. James figures now is as good a time as any.

Clint and Natasha meet him outside the towering building, bruised and bloodied, but alive.

“Where is he?”

“Gone, when he realized you weren’t here. Killed everyone inside. He has a gang of criminals and they’re calling themselves, get this, the Wolf Spiders.” Clint throws his head back and actually  _ laughs. _ “Can you believe that?”

“Why the hell were  _ you _ here?”

The two spies share a look. “We were hired to kill him.”

James tries not to feel hurt. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“It’s not like you’re an easy person to get ahold of!” Clint snaps, then throws his hands up when James give him a look. He holds his pinky and thumb up to his ear and mouth like a phone and lowers his voice. In Russian, he puts on a comical voice and says, “hello, Hydra, could you please put the Winter Soldier on the phone?”

Natasha smacks him. “We know where he’s going, though. The two of us alone can’t take him and the Wolf Spiders on. Are you in?”

She hardly finishes her sentence before James is saying, “I’m in.”

+

It isn’t often that James finds himself outside this particular Hydra base while conscious. He’s always frozen, or close to death, or being moved somewhere else.

“You’re  _ sure _ this is where he thinks I am?”

“As far as he’s concerned, this was the last place the Winter Soldier was,” Natasha confirms.

James looks over at Clint. “How on earth did you know I was in that apartment?”

Clint just shrugs, trudging forward and towards the base, which is nearly hidden between trees. He and natasha both let James grab them by the arms as he walks towards the main entrance, his face frozen in his usual Winter Soldier look. He finds himself outside of that persona more and more these days.

_ “Soldat,” _ a voice says from the speaker near the door. It takes James’ brain a moment to adjust to the Russian.  _ “Why aren’t you reporting to your handlers?” _

James shoves the spies towards the hidden camera he knows is there. “Hawkeye and Black Widow got in the way.”

There is a moment of confused silence, then the telltale sound of radio crackle.  _ “Did you complete your mission?” _

“Affirmative.” James isn’t even lying.

The door swings open without another word from the man behind the speaker. Immediately Hawkeye and the Black Widow have their weapons drawn and are inside, guns blazing, shooting Hydra agents and scientists alike.

They make it to the room with the Soldier’s chair and cryofreeze tank, the only man inside an agent that James recognizes as the one who always watches the tank while the Soldier thaws. He doesn’t even get to shout before there is an arrow in his eye.

“Now we just… wait for Constantin,” says Natasha, shutting the door behind them. “And hope that we killed enough agents to keep us here by ourselves for a while.”

+

When Niko  _ does _ show, he is by himself.

Wherever the other Wolf Spiders are, they do not appear in such dramatic fashion as Constantin does, blowing up the door they themselves came through and immediately stabbing Natasha in the leg with a shard of glass.

Clint shoots before James can, but the arrow doesn’t catch him as he dives for James, a gun pulled out of nowhere and pointed right at his heart. James just manages to shield himself with the metal hand, the crushed bullet falling uselessly onto the ground. James is stronger but Niko is unpredictable, moving wildly until he gets James into a headlock, knee pressed painfully to James’ spine and gun to the side of his head. Clint is a few feet away, his bow aimed at them.

James, for a fleeting moment, allows himself to admire Clint’s stance, his perfectly poised form. He can almost picture a book balanced on his head.

“You’re the one they replaced me with,” Niko grits out, in Russian.

“Yeah, look how well I turned out.”

The telltale sound of a gun cocking fills James’ ear. Clint shouts something, maybe in Russian or maybe in English, and there is a flash of red hair.

At least, James thinks as a gunshot fills the air and his head hits the floor, he died among friends.

+

When James wakes up, it isn’t cold like he expects. He isn’t sleeping on the floor of an abandoned building, or on a cot in a makeshift tent in the middle of a war. He’s in a bed, and for a moment he worries that he’s in a hospital, but there are no other telltale signs of a hospital stay, like a beeping heart monitor or sounds of people beyond the walls. The only sound he hears is classical music a few rooms away.

Slowly he opens his eyes, finds himself in a tiny bedroom with light blue walls and a lamp on the bedside table, the base made out of seashells. The sheets of the bed are soft against the clothes that aren’t his, and smell of lemon.

“Where am I?” he asks, finally letting his eyes land on Clint, who sits on a chair beside the bed.

“If I tell you, will you leave?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Clint purses his lips, huffing and leaning forward. “It’s my place. You’re safe here, I promise.”

James relaxes slightly, shifting until he’s lying on his side, facing Clint. His head hurts, it’s definitely wounded, but feels clean and bandaged, and not at all like a bullet wound. “Natasha killed him,” James says. It isn’t a question, but Clint still nods.

“That she did.”

He lets himself close his eyes and exhale, breathing in the clean sheets and homey feel of the bedroom before he forces himself to focus on what’s important. “How did you get me here?”

“The world is often kinder than you realize.”

James scoffs at that. Clint reaches forward, catching his left hand and entwining their fingers. “I’m serious.”

“I don’t doubt that you believe that.” James pulls their fingers apart and balls his hand into a fist. Clint’s fingers linger on the bed but make no move to grab at James’ again.

“You’re not going to go back, are you?”

“No.”

Clint lets out a long breath that he had clearly been holding. “Good. That’s… good.”

Mouth quirking up in an almost smile, James focuses in on Clint despite the pounding headache telling him not to. He has scars, both old and new, littered around his face and arms. This is the most comfortable James has ever seen him look, shoulders relaxed and hair messy from his hands running through it. There are no rules, in this little blue room, nothing he could do that would force punishment or memory adjustment. He looks, well, settled.

“I like your name,” says James offhandedly. Clint had chosen it himself, afterall. “It suits you.”

His mouth stretches into a wide smile, and before James can even think about it, Clint is crawling into the bed beside him, warm and soft and smelling more like cherries than like lemons. “Thank you,” he whispers, the grin still on his face. “Yours is pretty good, too.”

Part of James thinks that there’s still something missing, but they’re well on their way.

When James presses his hand to the side of Clint’s face, it does not surprise him. He thinks, right before he kisses Clint, that nothing about James has ever surprised the other man.

For once, he is happy to be wrong.

+

“Hm, you don’t strike me as a Bucky.”

“It’s probably the hair,” says Bucky, looking up at the giant photo of himself from World War II. Hair cut short to regulation but still styled perfectly, stubble trimmed in such a way that he probably thought attracted all the birds, and gaze far off. His eyes, grey and stony, are just about the only thing he recognizes about himself.

Clint’s arms snake themselves around Bucky’s neck from behind, the sides of their heads pressed together. Clint, taller and leaner, presses himself easily against Bucky and admires the portion of the exhibit in front of them, detailing Bucky Barnes’ life before and during the war. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s ‘cause you’ve had a million other names. I’ll just have to adjust.”

The photo on the screen in front of them shifts to a short clip of Bucky and Steve Rogers,  _ Captain America, _ laughing good naturedly. Bucky still can’t find any memories of him like that, big and brawny, floating around in his head. Just skinny little Steve, getting into fights that he shouldn’t be.

“He would’ve like you,” Bucky tells Clint earnestly.

“I’m sad I won’t get to meet him.” Clint untangles himself from Bucky, then grabs his hand. “Come on, let’s go to the gift shop. I need to buy, like,  _ all _ of those Bucky Bears.”

Bucky lets himself be tugged in the other direction, sparing one last look at the name underneath his picture.

**Author's Note:**

> my tumblr: andthwasp  
rebloggable version: https://andthwasp.tumblr.com/post/186782906677/i-cant-live-without-my-name


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